Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Friday

James Delingpole

Why I’m increasingly drawn to optimistic sci-fi

You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol and Alfred Molina as a character so elderly you’re supposed to believe that he could drop at any time. This is one of the running gags of The Boroughs, a sci-fi/monster series set in an upmarket, Stepford Wives-esque desert retirement village, and clearly aimed at aging farts like I very nearly am who imagine themselves to be much younger and groovier than they now are. “Don’t worry, wrinkly kids,” the series reassures us. “By the time you hit your seventies you’ll be taking more drugs and having more sex – even crazy, orgy sex [note to squeamish viewers: this scene takes place off camera] – than ever before.

boroughs
Sam Leith

Bond makes a great video game

Grade: A– He may not know how to make a drinkable martini, but James Bond makes a great videogame. GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 was the first, but there’s always been potential there for more. After all, the character has all the stuff that the medium excels at. He has car chases, he fights, he shoots people, he blows things up and he appeals strongly to adolescent boys. In 007: First Light, he gets ample opportunity to do all those things, sometimes in very quick succession. Our man here is not yet a wintry Daniel Craig, a suave Sean Connery or a campy Roger Moore: when we first encounter him in the mandatory pre-credits sequence he’s not even a spy.

Lloyd Evans

Michelle Terry is ferocious in Brecht’s simplistic tutorial

Bertolt Brecht’s classic, Mother Courage, is about a female war profiteer who drags a wagon of supplies through no man’s land and sells them to bedraggled soldiers. During the story, she loses both her children and she discovers that war is not as marvelous as she previously thought. This spiritual journey evidently mattered to Brecht, who was born in 1898 in Augsburg, and who greeted the outbreak of World War One with enthusiasm only to become disillusioned by the mechanized slaughter of the trenches. His play is aimed at wrong-headed militaristic numbskulls who believe that war is good rather than bad. If you already hold pacifist views, you may find his tutorial a little simplistic.

Robin Simon

The art of resurrecting forgotten artists

A retired priest in North Wales once told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to buy 19th-century paintings for the holiday-camp chapels, because they were going cheap. One he bought, for 49 guineas in 1947, was William Dyce’s 1835 “Lamentation of the Dead Christ.” In 1983, after the Butlin’s chapels had closed, it made a handy £125,000 at auction, when it was bought by Aberdeen Art Gallery. As late as 1962, Lord Leighton’s great “Flaming June” (1895) was sold for £50. Today? Millions. Talk about “the bubble reputation.” The pattern of artistic fame followed by subsequent obscurity has been repeated through the centuries.

Thursday

Julia Yost

Not all portrayals of Sherlock Holmes hit the mark

A great literary character, like a gemstone, has many facets. Sherlock Holmes looks different depending on where the light hits him: reasoning machine or bohemian creative, misogynist or white knight, disciplined professional or (in Dr. Watson’s words) “self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.” Film adaptations, of which there are no end, pick and choose their angles. Purists rush to tell us which onscreen Holmeses are valid and which travesty Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation. Occasionally the purists themselves betray Holmes, who had more going on than they recall. As for me, I’m purer than the purists. But when it comes to onscreen Sherlocks, I’m one big soft spot. Even by my liberal standards, Amazon’s recent streaming series Young Sherlock fails.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

How the YouTubers beat Star Wars

Last weekend saw the most unlikely battle between David and Goliath. The little film that could was none other than the psychological horror film Backrooms. It was made on a microscopic budget (in relative terms) of $10 million, yet went on to gross a staggering $81.4 million in the US alone in its opening weekend. And the big film that couldn’t was the not-so-eagerly awaited The Mandalorian and Grogu, which had a 70 percent drop at the box office from its (relatively) underwhelming opening weekend. Unless something wholly unexpected happens, it will conclude its run as the lowest-grossing Star Wars property, confirming the predictions of those who suggested that Disney have run the brand into the ground spectacularly.

Kane Parsons
Margaret Mitchell

How the office has come to haunt us

Should we hop on a call? Let’s touch base. Let’s take this offline. Let’s circle back to your last slide deck. Let’s get those action items actioned by close of play. We need stakeholder buy-in. We need deliverables. We need to make sure you’re aligned with company culture. We’re concerned you’re not leveraging your core competencies. After careful consideration, management has made the difficult decision to terminate your contract. We’re committed to helping you with this transition. Corporate jargon is zombified language. These euphemisms and elisions are the soulless husks of words, meant to blunt the sharp edges of human emotion (sorry – "maintain professionalism"). And they often leave you feeling a sneaking sense of dread.

Saturday

Richard Bratby

The Arts Council’s awful vision for the future of opera

English National Opera’s first production created in Manchester is Angel’s Bone, a one-act opera by Du Yun and the librettist Royce Vavrek. It was premiered in 2016 in New York and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, but we shouldn’t hold that against it. Musically, at least, it’s certainly more interesting than recent US imports like Jeanine Tesori’s Blue – worthy, subminimalist Yankslop addressing the fashionable issues of the day. (It’s funny how the classical music world imagines that the way to reach British audiences in 2026 is to program stuff that was relevant to Americans in 2016.) It was a pretty horrible experience nonetheless. Daytime TV-fixated suburbanites Mr. and Mrs. X.E.

opera
biennale
Digby Warde-Aldam

The Venice Biennale was just that bit worse than usual

The 61st Venice Biennale arrived freighted with portent. To cut a long story short: Russia and Israel were invited to exhibit, and the prize jurors resigned in protest. Then, on preview day, the city was hit by a storm of biblical force. I sat in the Stansted Wetherspoons for hours, oblivious to the fact that the Ryanair ahead of mine was taking a pummeling that ultimately landed it on the wrong side of the Adriatic. “It was terrifying,” a journalist colleague recounted. “And apparently, Bjork was on board, too.” The bad juju had set in last May when Koyo Kouoh, the program’s curator, dropped dead aged 57. The event was left rudderless, and with all due respect – it shows.

arthur miller
Alexander Larman

Why Arthur Miller is back in the limelight

Arthur Miller may have died two decades ago, but America’s answer to Euripides and Sophocles is having a moment. The great tragedian’s plays have been revived, and revived again, ever since he first broke through in 1947 with All My Sons, but even by his standards, the new productions just keep on coming. His most famous play, Death of a Salesman, has opened on Broadway to rave reviews and Tony nominations galore, with a cast-against-type Nathan Lane as the doomed Willy Loman and Laurie Metcalf as his loyal wife Linda. Across the pond, Bryan Cranston has recently finished an equally acclaimed run as Joe Keller in All My Sons.

Friday

James Delingpole

I’m done with Rivals

Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s "based on a true story," there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. "Thought they were just those men in white shirts embarrassing you at the airport by exposing the stash of cheap baccy hidden in your holiday underwear? Think again!" you can imagine the tagline running. The model here, of course, would be Top Gun – the 1986 movie, heavily supported by the US military, which supposedly caused the number of men applying to become US Navy fighter pilots to increase by 500 percent (a figure that’s since been debunked).

rivals
Martin Gayford

Derek Jacobi on playing Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films during the early 1940s; the only one in which he made the final cut was a farce starring the ukulele-playing comedian George Formby in which his 19-year-old face can be seen peering out of the background in one scene. Years later, Lucian claimed, John Huston asked him if he’d like to play the part of his grandfather Sigmund in a biographical screen drama from 1962 entitled Freud: The Secret Passion (which had, at one point, a script by Jean-Paul Sartre). Eventually Montgomery Clift was cast instead, which was just as well because Freud was definitely an observer rather than a performer.

Monday

Alexander Larman

How Disney ruined Star Wars

This week, the new Star Wars picture – the first live action film since 2019’s commercially successful but largely ridiculed Rise of Skywalker – will come out in cinemas. Clunkily entitled The Mandalorian and Grogu, it is a big-screen spin-off of the once-successful and now largely passé Mandalorian series. A lot is riding on its success, and Lucasfilm, now controlled by Dave Filoni, will be very relieved if it is a hit. Unfortunately, audiences don’t seem especially interested. Advance word on it has been mediocre for some time now – the words “feature-length television movie" have been used more than once – and the box office prediction for its opening weekend is currently somewhere between $70 and $85 million.

Friday

Ivo Delingpole

Rivals is an ode to Thatcherite excess

Today, Rivals returns for a second series on Disney+. The first series was that rarest of phenomena: an adaptation that didn’t hate its source material. Sure, the producers decided to cram the plot with more subtle-as-a-sledgehammer politics than appears in the actual book, but you could tell they revered Jilly Cooper and the world of Rutshire and wanted to do it justice. Cooper executively produced the first series but must have been away on some days (I can’t see her let a well-heeled huntswoman pronounce the Beaufort hunt "Boh-fore" rather than "Boh-fuht," particularly when a major scene in the book hinges on the pronunciation of "Belvoir").

rivals
queen
Nicky Haslam

How to dress a queen

The problem with exhibiting costumes is well known. Should the mannequins be lifelike with human features, or faceless? What about trying a more surreal approach with Perspex or metals? This show of her late Majesty’s wardrobe opts for something more ghostly: hundreds of shoulderless, neckless, wristless, legless figures, floating magically in space, presented in cases at eye level, with others, higher, in serried ranks, like some gorgeously arrayed terracotta army. The unifying factor is that instantly recognizable royal silhouette – from the youthful wasp waist to the later fuller frame.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Riveting: Kokuho reviewed

A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you may one day wish to visit the kabuki theater in Tokyo, although be warned: the shortest production is four hours. Some last all day. Looked at this way, you are getting off lightly here. Directed by Lee Sang-il, and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s two-part novel, the film is a drama spanning 50 years. It opens in 1964, in Nagasaki, with the shocking killing of a crime boss while his 14-year-old son Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa) looks on.

Richard Bratby

A spring mood lifter: Tales of Love and Loss at the Linbury Theater reviewed

This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked by a theme of bereavement. That sounds bleak until you consider that Puccini’s Trittico was originally inspired by The Divine Comedy, and who bothers about that today? Anyway, the three operas that make up Tales of Love and Loss are far from dispiriting in their overall effect. Like Puccini, Talia Stern – who directs all three – has gone for two tragedies plus a raucous, palate-cleansing comedy. And like Gianni Schicchi, the final laugh-fest (Elena Langer’s Four Sisters) plays out around a barely cold corpse and sends you into the night feeling uneasy, but undeniably entertained.

flowers
Melanie McDonagh

The art of flowers

Multisensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there are scent stations where you can smell damask rose or green and black tea from flower-shaped chalices. From the ceiling hang swaths of green muslin. I could have stayed here all afternoon. Right in front of me were also two delicious studies of tulips to illustrate the Dutch craze of the 1630s. Frankly, if it came to a choice of two-tone tulips or bitcoin as a way of squandering money, I know which I’d prefer. There is a print of a sultan’s seraglio in this tulip section.

Thursday

James Panero

The message behind the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale

“All art is propaganda,” wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Upon this subtle distinction rests the success or failure of whatever art we see at the Venice Biennale.  The Most Serene Republic’s exercise in art-world Olympics is propaganda by design. A garden of national pavilions – small buildings in various styles as you might find in a zoological park – presents exhibitions that compete with one another for a “Golden Lion for Best National Participation.” Here, in the murky parkland of the Giardini in the city’s eastern Castello district, nationalist and anti-nationalist passions mix with art-market imbroglio into a sordid spectacle. Just how bad will it be this year? To discover the answer is why we keep coming back.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Does The Odyssey confirm that Christopher Nolan is camp?

Sir Christopher Nolan is many things. The Spielberg/Lucas/Cameron manqué of our time. A double Oscar-winner for Oppenheimer, a picture that is nowhere near his best work. The most acclaimed director of film bros, who somehow ignore his standing as a white, British privately educated filmmaker. But what nobody has ever seriously asked before is “Is Sir Christopher camp?” I hesitate to say that. The (relatively) newly knighted director is as serious a figure as has ever been seen in the film industry. But after watching the new trailer for his magnum opus, The Odyssey, it is a question that I must ask. We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey-ho.

odyssey